Ewan MacColl, Dogmatist of British Folk, Gets a Tribute Album

By Jim Farber

Oct. 28, 2015

Image

The folk singer Ewan MacColl, subject of a new tribute album.CreditCreditVia Compass Records

He called Bob Dylan’s songs “10th-rate drivel,” fit only for “a completely noncritical audience.” He hated the countless recordings of his own most famous composition so much, he corralled them into a collection he named “the chamber of horrors.” And he found any electrified instrument so false that when his 13-year-old son bought his first souped-up guitar, he wouldn’t speak to the boy for three weeks.

“He was a stylistic fascist,” Calum MacColl said of his imposing and brilliant father, Ewan MacColl.

As his third wife, Peggy Seeger, half sister to Pete Seeger, observed, “His whole life, Ewan was hitting a hard nail through a hard rock.”

Along with artists like Bert Lloyd and Shirley Collins, Mr. MacColl led the great British folk revival of the 1950s, representing its values and goals at their most untainted. His role as a pivotal figure in folk history is being celebrated this week with an all-star tribute album, “Joy of Living” (Compass Records), timed for what would have been Mr. MacColl’s 100th year. (He died in 1989 at 74.)

The album, assembled by his musician sons, Calum and Neill, features covers of Mr. MacColl’s best-known songs, the foremost being “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which Roberta Flack turned into the No. 1 song of 1972. (Naturally, Mr. MacColl despised that version, considering it elaborate and labored.) The set showcases Steve Earle rendering an appropriately disheveled “Dirty Old Town,” a song recorded by stars from Rod Stewart to the Pogues. There are also pointed and austere performances from Rufus Wainwright, Billy Bragg, David Gray, Jarvis Cocker and more, covering the songwriter’s classics from “The Shoals of Herring” to “Moving On Song.”

In many of his songs Mr. MacColl cast working people — miners, whalers and factory employees — as heroes and muses, and he wrote often of Gypsies and the displaced. His elevation of the working class reflected political beliefs that were inseparable from his art. He grew up in soot-choked Salford, England, the even wronger side of the river from Manchester; his Scottish-born father was an iron molder and both parents were socialists who instilled in him an unshakable adherence to leftist politics. Early on, he wrote an ode to Stalin; later, he identified as a Maoist.

Even in those polarizing worlds, Mr. MacColl could stir special trouble. “He joined the Communist Party three or four times — and got kicked out three or four times,” Ms. Seeger said in a phone interview from her home in Oxford, England. “He kept trying to comment on how imperfect a lot of the leadership was.”

Mr. MacColl’s earliest efforts to erase the line between art and politics centered on drama. In 1931, he created an agitprop theater group called the Red Megaphones, which later became Theater of Action. There, he met the first of his three wives, the theater director Joan Littlewood. He was 30, with a long history as a playwright and actor, when he changed his birth name, James Miller, to Ewan MacColl and devoted himself to folk. He believed music could be more effective than theater at spurring people to political action.

Mr. MacColl brought to folk a new urban focus. “The first wave of the folk revival, from the late 19th century, had a nostalgic view of rural England that didn’t reflect the industrial tradition,” said Rob Young, author of the folk history “Electric Eden.” “People like MacColl and Peggy Seeger led a second-wave revival, which stopped folk from becoming a nostalgia industry for the middle- and upper-middle classes,” Mr. Young added. “They gave it vitality.”

The two did so most aggressively at their London club Ballads and Blues, established in 1953. There, they created “the rules,” which dictated that a singer could perform songs only from his or her own culture. Ms. Seeger considers criticism that Mr. MacColl was rigid as unfair. “With Bach or Brahms, we try to reproduce the music the way the composers wrote it and people don’t call it rigid,” she said. “But because folk comes from the working class, people say, ‘These are just basic works — let’s see what we can do with them.’ They look down on it.”

Mr. Gray, who performs the title track on the tribute album, agreed. “Homogeneity is what they were fighting,” he said. “They were fighting the Americanization of folk music at a time when our own British, Scottish and Irish songs were dying.”

Mr. MacColl kicked up extra controversy through his relationship with Ms. Seeger. When they met, she was just 22; he was 20 years her senior and married to his second wife, Jean Newlove (mother to his daughter, the pop star Kirsty MacColl, who died in 2000). “Everyone predicted doom and gloom for him and me,” Ms. Seeger said.

Instead, the pair became hugely productive creators of songs, as well as radio plays for the BBC. In 1957, Mr. MacColl’s love for Ms. Seeger inspired “The First Time,” later recorded by everyone from Wayne Newton to the Flaming Lips.

On the tribute album, Paul Buchanan delivers an unfussy version of that classic. Calum MacColl made sure to include such personal songs to soften his father’s image. “We wanted this to be a celebration, not a po-faced homage,” he said.

Ms. Seeger said she felt the album burnished Mr. MacColl’s legacy. His great ambition, she said, was to write a song “that would sink so deep into the memory of a nation that they would forget who made it up — and he did just that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Paying Homage to a Dogmatist of British Folk . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe